Case Study: Expedia

Case Study: Expedia

Jason Balchand – 5th Feb, 2019

Interactive brand exposure to 7,200+ people over the span of 28 days with a market-leading conversion rate and a near perfect engagement rate. That’s what happened when Expedia and Mamamia partnered with Komo to run a unique digital campaign designed to help people discover their ideal holiday destination.

Read on to find out how we did it.

Some Background Info

Anyone who’s been on a holiday that involved selecting a destination or accommodation has probably heard of Expedia. If you haven’t been on an awesome holiday or just haven’t heard of them, here’s a little background info. (When you’ve finished reading, head over there and book yourself a holiday).

Expedia is an innovative company that helped change the way people plan and book their holidays. It’s a web platform that allows users to easily compare and book flights, cruises, cars, and most other holiday-related activities.

Expedia strives to provide ‘everything travel in one place,’ while offering low and affordable prices for travellers from all over the world.

Campaign Objective

Expedia wanted to run a campaign that was a little different; a campaign that truly moved the needle when it came to engaging their audience.

They already have a strong brand presence in the market and wanted to leverage that existing brand awareness into a campaign that resulted in a deeper connection with their audience.

This is where Komo excels. Komo provides a market-leading suite of engagement technology specifically designed to increase engagement rates with marketing campaigns and build stronger relationships between brands and their customers.

Creativity Unfolded

The fun part. We used our collective experience and creativity to develop a fun personality quiz that allowed users to discover which holiday instagrammer they are.

Understanding the target audience was a key element when basing the game content around Instagram.

The concept was to use a series of fun and engaging questions to help people discover what the answers said about their personality. We then used those answers in conjunction with our cool tech to recommend the next holiday destination for that user.

Here’s the quiz we designed:

Leveraging Social Media

The great thing about highly engaging digital content is that you can place it on social media and immediately attract organic reach. This was definitely the case with this campaign as everyone wanted to share their holiday results and tag in their friends who they might want to be holidaying with. So not only did Expedia attract the Mamamia audience they also attracted a whole new audience.

This social element was one of the key drivers of the campaign’s success. The Komo product suite has been designed with social media virality in mind. We realised that virality doesn’t happen by accident, so we’ve created opportunities within our products that maximise the chance that someone shares, in this case, their holiday results, onto their chosen social media channels. This provided, in essence, a personal recommendation of the Expedia brand every time someone shared their results or tagged their friends.

Market Research

A bonus outcome for Expedia was the market research intelligence we were able to provide as a result of the quiz answers. Through our unique gamified and non-intrusive quiz questions, we were able to uncover some interesting insights, trends, and customer preferences when it came to things like preferred holiday destinations. For a business such as Expedia, this information is invaluable and can be used to inform future marketing campaigns so that they are more targeted and return better results.

The Results

Because this approach resulted in a highly personalised experience, we were able to deliver KPIs that exceeded expectations.

More than 7,200 people clicked through to start playing the quiz with some people playing more than once, it was that engaging!

More than 5,900 of those people completed the quiz to the end and were delivered their personalised result and holiday destination. That’s an industry-leading completion rate of over 82% which comes down to either the creative and engaging content or a fantastic user experience… or both 😊

The quiz also resulted in over 138 hours of total time that people engaged with the Expedia brand. We were able to drive a deeper level of engagement with people because the campaign connected with the emotional side of people’s brains instead of the rational side. Choosing a destination for a holiday can be a gruelling experience for most people because of the emotional connection and the lifelong memories that are created. We wanted to associate these positive memories and experiences with the Expedia brand so that, in the future, when those people are considering their next holiday, they automatically think of Expedia.

Along with the personalised result, a Komo “smart ad” was displayed alongside the personality result that allowed the user to click through and book the holiday that the quiz had matched to them. Now, while we can’t share how many holidays were booked as a result of those ads, all we can say is when you allow the user to take themselves down their own path and they are presented with an advertisement which matches the path they have chosen, the click-through rates on the Komo smart ads have reached up to 39%.

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Your Turn

If you’ve read this far, you probably have a thought in the back of your head about how a campaign might look for your company. Stop thinking! That’s our job. Reach out and have a chat with us about what audience engagement tools we have and how our creative team can create a bespoke campaign that smashes your campaign objectives.